Most people spend one-third of their work days at their job, and employers should create a healthy working environment, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday, as a survey showed that 40.4 percent of employees are overweight.
The agency on Workers’ Day released statistics from its working population health condition survey last year, which also suggested that 51.8 percent of workers do not get enough exercise.
The survey showed that 54.9 percent of workers eat breakfast outside of the home more than five times a week on average, 61.5 percent eat lunch outside more than five times a week and only 19.2 percent consume the suggested daily amount of fruit and vegetables.
HPA Community Health Division head Lin Li-ju (林莉茹) said that since employees spend about one-third of their work day at their place of employment — during which many people sit for long hours — combined with a lack of exercise and fruit and vegetable intake, people can easily become overweight.
The agency encouraged employers to make an open commitment to promote healthier workplaces by setting up group health improvement goals, understanding employees’ health needs by reviewing their examination reports, setting up exercise groups, ordering healthier lunch boxes and unsweetened drinks and rewarding departments for improvement.
Studies have shown that promoting a healthier workplace could have many benefits for employees and the company, including reducing resignation and sick leave rates and employees’ stress and work injuries, as well as increasing productivity, work quality and employee satisfaction, and improving corporate image, it said.
Lin said employees could also adopt healthier daily habits, such as getting off the bus one stop early, climbing the stairs instead of taking the elevator, standing up and moving more, and eating a balanced diet with enough fiber.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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